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The End of the Suburbs by Leigh Gallagher: Review

Just the facts, m'am. No lectures here

Leigh Gallagher's The End of the Suburbs, Random House, 284 pages, $24.95.

Leigh Gallagher

By Dimitri Nasrallah

Fri., Aug. 16, 2013

How much time do you spend commuting to and from work? Chances are if you live in Toronto’s suburbs, which have sprawled in recent decades to reasonably include Hamilton, Barrie, Cobourg, and any number of formerly isolated towns within that ever-widening radius, that drive probably takes much longer than it did for your parents. The sheer sprawl of our suburban infrastructures, which were first sold en-masse to a post-war public as the revolutionary dream of owning your own property, has over the course of a half-century grown into a complex economic hurdle and the source of much individual malaise.

The way in which people are looking to resolve the inefficiencies of contemporary suburbia is the inspiration behind Leigh Gallagher’s admirably researched first book, The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving. The argument here is not about why the suburbs ought to end. Gallagher wisely sidesteps that value judgment and its accompanying polemics to instead focus on the wide array of data that demonstrates that the suburbs are in fact ending.

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Home ownership, the cornerstone of the American Dream, wasn’t always so fraught with problems. Prior to the Second World War, owning a house was the providence of the wealthy. Bedroom communities sprouted around commuter train lines, providing an efficient village of shops, schools, and other necessities, all surrounded by a walkable orbit of densely built custom homes. These types of pre-car suburbs, the first outer rungs from city centres, had the effect of fostering community exchange and are still desirable today.

But two forces emerged in the post-war era to shape the suburbs we know today. Firstly, government regulations affected changes to mortgage rules that rendered almost the entire value of a house into something a person could borrow, a bank loan guaranteed by the government. This instantly converted the mortgage into one of the most profitable and risk-free products the banking sector could offer. Secondly, the widespread love affair with automobiles led to an unprecedented growth of infrastructure around its use.

So post-war suburbia emerged as a function of banking profitability and car reliance. This wasn’t a concern to families who moved to the suburbs in the ’60s and ’70s, when fuel cost a fraction of what it does now, jobs were plentiful, and kids could still play outdoors unsupervised. But in the last few decades, as newer rungs of suburbs have spread ever-further from cities, as builders have found ways to make them more cheaply mass-constructed, as energy costs have become a real issue, and as fewer parents feel safe letting their kids roam free, our priorities have changed.

Beyond all our personal gripes about commutes and isolation, Gallagher points out that today’s low-density suburbs in remote locales are unaffordable from a municipal perspective. Although municipalities are happy enough to let builders pay the up-front costs of all that piping, electricity and other essentials required of new neighbourhoods, none of them can afford the long-term costs of maintaining that groundwork between spacious lots in the middle of former farmland. The thin tax base simply doesn’t cover it, and the only way to recoup the deficit is to let more builders in. Herein lies the dangerous cycle of sprawl: the up-front costs of building more sprawl are the only means to offset the long-term costs of the sprawl that already exists.

Today, millions of these cheaply built McMansions on former farmland sit empty across the United States. Adding to all the aforementioned issues, Gallagher notes, demographics have shifted away from suburban life. The population is older, younger, and more diverse. There are fewer families among us, and the suburbs were never suited to the single life. Many millenials, who grew up in the suburbs of the ’80s and ’90s, feel negatively enough about their experience to not want to live there. And most millenials don’t share their parents’ allegiance to the car.

The End of the Suburbs’ convincing analytical rigour means that suburbs are inefficient constructs for the lives we now desire. According to Gallagher, our preferences for how and where we live change once or twice a century. We’re in the midst of a shift at the moment. The suburbs won’t disappear altogether, but for American builders, municipalities, and property owners, the unchecked spread of sprawl appears to have come to an end.

Dimitri Nasrallah is an author and regular contributor to the Star’s book pages.

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